This new incarnation of the candidate was supercharged and on the offensive. He didn’t just move to the middle, he made a headlong dive. This Mitt Romney isn’t like the other Mitt Romney, who hated everything about the president’s health care plan. This Romney likes parts of it, and he likes parts of Dodd Frank as well, even though he resists market regulation. He loves schools and teachers and he wants to take care of the poor and raise the middle class.

He loves his home state and he’s proud of the health care laws he helped pass there, even though that plan is a point-for-point blueprint of the president’s Affordable Health Care Act, which Romney promises to repeal.

He seems like a genial fellow, a devoted family man. But he has sold his soul in the fight to become president. He is inauthentic, fake and transparently disingenuous. Right up there on the debate stage he condemned aspects of the president’s proposals, twisting and spinning the truth until it was unrecognizable.

Just a few weeks ago, we heard him speak (via a YouTube video made public by Mother Jones magazine) to a group of campaign contributors in Florida. He spoke about what he said was “47 percent” of Americans, stating, “My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives … There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what … who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement …”

Those remarks, made at a private meeting, were clearly what Romney truly believes, and many of the people I know who are voting for him agree with everything he said at that meeting. In fact, that’s why they intend to vote for him: because he promises his donors that he won’t spend time or money on the 47 percent of Americans he writes off as “those people.”